Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture

Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings

Cathy McGlynn, Margaret O'Neill, Michaela Schrage-Früh, Cathy McGlynn, Margaret O'Neill, Michaela Schrage-Früh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319636085
• eBook ISBN: 9783319636092
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This timely collection engages with representations of women and ageing in literature and visual culture. Acknowledging that cultural conceptions of ageing are constructed and challenged across a variety of media and genres, the editors bring together experts in literature and visual culture to foster a dialogue across disciplines. Exploring the process of ageing in its cultural reflections, refractions and reimaginings, the contributors to Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture analyse how artists, writers, directors and performers challenge, and in some cases reaffirm, cultural constructions of ageing women, as well as give voice to ageing women's subjectivities. The book concludes with an afterword by Germaine Greer which suggests possible avenues for future research.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Editors and Contributors
• List of Figures
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Part I Narratives of Ageing
• Chapter 2 Making the Invisible Visible: The Presence of Older Women Artists in Early Modern Artistic Biography
• Chapter 3 Losing One’s Self: The Depiction of Female Dementia Sufferers in Iris (2001) and The Iron Lady (2011)
• Chapter 4 “Embarking, Not Dying”: Clare Boylan’s Beloved Stranger as Reifungsroman
• Chapter 5 The Age Performances of Peggy Shaw: Intersection, Interoception and Interruption
• Part II Social Roles: Mothers, Widows, Spinsters
• Chapter 6 Closing In: Restrictive Spaces for Ageing Mothers in Jane Austen’s Novels
• Chapter 7 “No One Noticed Her”: Ageing Spinsters and Youth Culture in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Short Stories
• Chapter 8 Stories of Motherhood and Ageing in ABC’s Television Programme Once Upon a Time
• Chapter 9 “She Says She’s Thirty-Five but She’s Really Fifty-One”: Rebranding the Middle-Aged Postfeminist Protagonist in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones: Mad about The Boy
• Part III The Body and Embodiment
• Chapter 10 Older Women and Sexuality On-Screen: Euphemism and Evasion?
• Chapter 11 A Certain Truth in Fiction: Perceptions of the Ageing Process in Irish Women’s Fiction
• Chapter 12 Future and Present Imaginaries: The Politics of the Ageing Female Body in Lena Dunham’s Girls (HBO, 2012–Present)
• Chapter 13 The New Model Subject: “Coolness” and the Turn to Older Women Models in Lifestyle and Fashion Advertising
• Chapter 14 Performances of Situated Knowledge in the Ageing Female Body
• Part IV Class, ‘Race’ and Agency
• Chapter 15 “I Become Shameless as a Child”: Childhood, Femininity and Older Age in J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron
• Chapter 16 African American Humour and the Construction of a Mature Female Middle-Class Identity in Clarence Major’s Such Was the Season
• Chapter 17 “This Is How Time Unfolds When You Are Old”: Ageing, Subjectivity and Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light
• Chapter 18 The Visibility of Women’s Ageing and Agency in Suzanne Lacy’s The Crystal Quilt (1987) and Silver Action (2013)
• Chapter 19 Afterword
• Index